Digging deeper: Smaller changes in OS X Mountain Lion

The major new features in OS X Mountain Lion are what everyone is talking about, but with every release of OS X, Apple makes some smaller changes that escape the notice of most. We’re going to take a look at some of those changes, starting with more general ones dealing with look and feel, up to some new features in apps like Mail and Safari.

General

When you move a large file in the Finder, the file icon reflects the progress, just like when you install an app on iOS. The default progress dialog also opens, but I imagine it’ll be gone in later builds of Mountain Lion.

The iOS-like scrollbars in Lion are pretty thin, and they stay thin when you hover over them, making them harder to target with the cursor. In Mountain Lion, scrollbars are noticeably wider, so they’re easier to hit.

In Lion, grid-view Stacks still used the scrollbars from Snow Leopard, which is odd given that every other scrollbar has been iOS-ified. Not any more — in Mountain Lion they’ve been replaced by darker iOS-like scrollbars.

Last, there are some changes to System Preferences. There are new slide-show-style screen savers in the Desktop & Screen Saver pane, similar to the ones for Apple TV. The Universal Access preference pane has a cleaner interface, and it’s been renamed “Accessibility” and moved from the Personal section to the System section.

Versions

When you begin editing a document that’s just been saved, the “Edited” status in the toolbar will flash blue three times, to make sure you know.

When duplicating a document, it lets you change the name right in the title bar, instead of just creating a new document with “copy” at the end of the name. You can also just hit Cmd-Shift-S to duplicate, so you don’t need to map that shortcut in System Preferences.

In the Versions drop-down menu, there’s a new “Move To” option, so you can move the current file around on your Mac, or to iCloud.

Launchpad & Dashboard

Launchpad has a new search bar at the top, which lets you filter through applications just by typing. You can key through them and press enter to launch them.

Dashboard has a new interface for adding widgets, and it works exactly like Launchpad. It even has folders, for those hyper-organized Dashboard users (if they exist).

Safari

Safari has a bunch of small refinements that make it easier to use. First, there’s a unified search bar and address bar, à la Chrome’s Omnibox. URLs are grayed out after the domain name, and the “http://” is stripped out as well.

Tabs scale proportionally now, so if you have two tabs open, they’ll each take up half of the tab bar instead of a fixed width like before. This actually isn’t entirely new, as the Safari 4 beta did the same thing, though Apple axed the behavior before final release.

Mail

You can now designate contacts as VIPs, so their emails will show up in a separate mailbox in the sidebar. Inline find is another new edition to Mail, and it works much the same as it does in Safari, with the addition of find and replace when composing a new email.

The new Mail lacks RSS support, which has also been taken from Safari. It seems Apple doesn’t see the point in keeping that feature around.

Preview

Preview has a simplified toolbar, with View, Zoom and Share on the left, and Crop, Rotate and Edit on the right. The Edit button opens a toolbar where all of Preview’s other tools reside, similar to the Edit button in the iOS Photos app.

Calendar and Contacts

There are some pretty minor changes to Calendar and Contacts. In Calendar, the calendar’s drop-down menu is gone, replaced by a slide-out sidebar instead. Also, the faux-stitching has been removed from the toolbar. Also, the search box now supports search tokens, like in Mail.

In Contacts, the red bookmark used to access groups is gone. Instead, there are three different views.

It’s clear that Mountain Lion is all about simplifying OS X: getting rid of things that don’t work, and refining things that do.

What else do you think Apple should change before Mountain Lion is released this summer?